How to Find Legal Free Images for Your Site

In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to find images that are licensed for you to use on your site, free of charge.

All you’ll be doing is looking for images that have a Creative Commons license. There’s two main places that I tend to look for them: Flickr and Google.

Flickr

For me, Flickr is far more superior because it does not include images from stock photography sites, which typically have watermarks on their images. And there’s a vast number of photographers and artists on there with an exceptional amount of talent, who wouldn’t otherwise have an outlet for their work.

As it stands, there are well over 150 million images with a Creative Commons license on Flickr. If you can’t find what you’re looking for here, you’re probably looking for something specialist and that is when my search turns towards Google instead.

First consider what kind of license you need to be searching under – if you’re a commercial entity, you can’t use images under the Non-commercial licenses. If you want to alter the image, you can’t use the NoDerivs licensed material (go back to my Creative Commons Guide if you need help deciding which license is right for you).

Bear in mind that if you need something under the Non-commercial NoDerivs license, you can also search under the attribution only license, so long as you’re not a commercial entity and you don’t plan to alter the image.

Once you find your image, simply save it and upload it to your own blog, crediting the owner as comprehensively as possible. I typically use the Flickr screen name and a link back to their gallery.

Google

When I have a very specific image in mind and I’m not able to find it on Flickr, I turn to the mother of all knowledge – Google – to solve my problem.

In 2009, Google added a feature to its Advanced Search for Images which allows you to search for licensed images. It is based on the Creative Commons licenses, so you should be familiar with the terminology.

Once you pull up the Advanced Search page, you’ll see an option near the bottom for “usage rights”. Just select the appropriate option for what you need, enter your search term and you’re away.

When you find the image, double check the license at the source and be sure to credit the artist with as much information as possible, such as name, source website and link.

What methods do you use to find images for your site? Comments are always appreciated here.

I used to use Zemanta, but I didn’t like the way it added it’s styling to my posts. I’m a bit overprotective of how my posts look, so it wasn’t working out for me. As I’m writing this, I’m realising that it’s maybe necessary for me to lighten up a little.

That’s funny :) What didn’t you like about the style? I think the way you have the image positioned in this post is the same way Zemanta does it on my post. I like that I can choose between left and right placement because I prefer right. There are times when I’d like the image centered but that’s not an option with Zemanta – I’m not sure why though :)

Flicker is always a preferred places for searching free legal images. it’s really a great service offered by yahoo. I think there should be a service like flicker from Google side also which allows user for searching images which do not have a copy write issue.

Indeed. Doing a simple image search on Google is futile because you get all the pay-for-access sites, though including an operator to eliminate the word royalty is a great idea. I wonder what the search results look like at that point.

Flickr is definitely my go-to resource though. I can usually find what I’m looking for there.

Another kickass power user tip. I always knew you could use Flickr if you give a credit link. I did not however know that you could use Google to search for images that give you free usage rights. Thanks for the awesome tip.

Hi and thank you for the article!
I can also add http://www.picdrome.com, a growing Public Domain picture collection, free of copyright and licensed under Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Public Domain Dedication. All items are free to download for personal and commercial use, without restriction and are available in high definition. New photos are added on a daily basis.

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